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Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#91

Post by ktaylor »

Interesting thread. I've gleaned a few useful ideas.

http://www.eventwax.com is an online event registration tool that uses several techniques for increasing traffic.

1. We use a freemium model and about 75% of our users use the free service to host their free events. This helps us because of #2 below.

2. Our built in viral mechanism is that when one hosts an event, everyone who signs up for an event sees a "powered by eventwax" logo at the bottom of the registration pages. So, even for free events, we are getting a tiny bit of passive exposure to all event's audiences. That means 10's of thousands of people a month see our logo.

3. We have a semi-active blog that brings in some high quality traffic.

4. We've had success at targeting a few keyword phrases that bring in a bit of traffic but SEO targeting has also been one of our biggest disappointments. Online event registration is a very competitive field and we've "wasted" a lot of time trying to improve our keywords.

5. We do run very limited Google Adwords and Linkedin PPC campaigns but haven't optimized them yet. Our current combined budget is only about $100/month. The next think we need to do is "bucket" our keywords into semantic groups and then create custom landing pages for each group to increase relevancy.

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#92

Post by RealGeek »

yoshyosh wrote: post #57
RealGeek wrote: post #4

I've had decent traction with http://www.ranksignals.com over the past year with SEO, Content Marketing and Email marketing. My app is a SEO tool to explore backlinks of competitors. There is also a SEO Chrome extension ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-seo-pagerank... )which drives returning visitors to the website.

I've been looking for something like this, awesome to see it. That's the issue with marketing, there is a subset of users that are looking for your product, or know they have some sort of problem that needs solving. How you get to specifically them is the tough part. I bet there are a lot of other up and coming products that just get drowned out/fail to get traction, yet these are the ones that are really trying to i…

Long tail SEO and content marketing is an effective way to reach niche audience. Additionally, we've got a lot of users from niche forums. Moreover, this is the kind of traffic that converts best.

I have been able to get very good traction with it, and my app has not been featured on any main stream tech blogs yet.

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#93

Post by NikaLander »

We have launched Varycode (https://www.varycode.com/) about a year and a half ago. It is online source code convertor between C#, VB, Java, C++, Ruby, Python and Boo. Have not been doing any marketing or PR for quite a long time because were still adding new directions of conversion, fixing bugs and improving design, but were getting new users by spreading word of mouth by customers who liked our service. Right now we are running social Like and Share campaign (unlimited access as a bonus), writing pitches to programing magazine’s editors and bloggers and planning on providing trendsetters with a free account. Daily users and registrations numbers have doubled.

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#94

Post by LukeHoersten »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #88
LukeHoersten wrote: post #41

I have a side project http://racemetric.com for simple athletic race registration and credit card processing (just released). It's all written in Haskell and brand new. Any ideas about how to specifically drive traffic would be extremely helpful. The idea is to accept credit card registration payments within minutes instead of having to talk to sales people, get a merchant account, build a custom web page, etc.

Be really careful about handling payments properly - specifically, make sure you wait a while after the race day before transferring money to the organizers. Or only transfer money to them if you've actually met and verified them. Otherwise you expose your company (make sure you are incorporated!) to significant financial risk. See the discussion here, which relates to why Paypal hates conference organizers: https://…

Great suggestions. I've thought a lot about this area and feel I've struck a good balance for risk vs. low barrier to entry. People don't think about it but third party payment aggregation is extremely risky from a fraud perspective and many times that cost gets passed on to the users.

Unfortunately I don't think I can hold off on payment collection until after the race because organizers need the registration money to actually pay for the race facilities. Any suggestions there?

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#95

Post by yummyfajitas »

LukeHoersten wrote: post #94
yummyfajitas wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be really careful about handling payments properly - specifically, make sure you wait a while after the race day before transferring money to the organizers. Or only transfer money to them if you've actually met and verified them. Otherwise you expose your company (make sure you are incorporated!) to significant financial risk. See the discussion here, which relates to why Paypal hates conference organizers: https://…

Great suggestions. I've thought a lot about this area and feel I've struck a good balance for risk vs. low barrier to entry. People don't think about it but third party payment aggregation is extremely risky from a fraud perspective and many times that cost gets passed on to the users. Unfortunately I don't think I can hold off on payment collection until after the race because organizers need the registration money…

One idea would be to pay the race facilities directly, rather than paying the organizers. Now someone trying to rob you will need to set up 2 identities to do it...

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#97

Post by techaddict009 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #32
RealGeek wrote: post #4

I've had decent traction with http://www.ranksignals.com over the past year with SEO, Content Marketing and Email marketing. My app is a SEO tool to explore backlinks of competitors. There is also a SEO Chrome extension ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-seo-pagerank... )which drives returning visitors to the website.

Interesting! What are you using as your data source to find backlinks?

Same question here. What is source? From where are you finding backlinks? google search?

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#98

Post by rachelandrew »

Our side project (http://grabaperch.com) ultimately became our main business. We're a couple of developers, when we launched four and a half years ago we had little to no marketing knowledge. So I have learned by experimenting.

We launched into an audience we knew well, and already worked for. The product is pitched at web designers, as a consultancy the majority of our clients were web design agencies. Our main initial tactic - and something we still do - was to write content that appealed to that audience. Not necessarily anything to do with content management, but anything that might appeal to designers and design agencies and then link back to Perch.

I've experimented quite a bit with BuySellAds (http://buysellads.com/). There are bargains to be had that convert well if you look at the smaller sites, and find those that are well matched to your audience. They might not send through huge amounts of traffic but if they are really well selected then the conversion rate can be better than the expensive high traffic sites.

The surprising success for us in terms of advertising has been sponsoring relevant podcasts. In our case that is podcasts that target web designers. The trick is to sponsor those who actually take the time to talk a bit about the product during the show - rather than just read out your name at the beginning. We've also managed to find podcasts where the hosts use Perch - that's even better!

Mostly it is just working on incremental gains in terms of traffic and visibility. An article here and there, some well placed ads, sponsoring podcasts. None of this causes a crazy rush of traffic but we're in it for the long game, so a steady growth that is sustainable is really more interesting to me.

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#99

Post by ericthegoodking »

rachelandrew wrote: post #98

Our side project ( http://grabaperch.com ) ultimately became our main business. We're a couple of developers, when we launched four and a half years ago we had little to no marketing knowledge. So I have learned by experimenting. We launched into an audience we knew well, and already worked for. The product is pitched at web designers, as a consultancy the majority of our clients were web design agencies. Our main in…

Interesting!Your website looks amazing. Good job on the design.

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#100

Post by eddyparkinson »

rachelandrew wrote: post #98

Our side project ( http://grabaperch.com ) ultimately became our main business. We're a couple of developers, when we launched four and a half years ago we had little to no marketing knowledge. So I have learned by experimenting. We launched into an audience we knew well, and already worked for. The product is pitched at web designers, as a consultancy the majority of our clients were web design agencies. Our main in…

I like the perch tag idea.

Can you help, you understand web designers, would this suit the web designer market: An easy way of creating/editing web applications, lets people who have basic excel skills build sophisticated web applications. http://www.cellmaster.com.au/AppBuilder.html

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